[Prefatory Note: The review below was published in the current issue of Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and Islamicate World. I am posting it here because I believe that Jeff Halper’s book deserves the widest possible reading. It explains clearly and convincingly one of the deepest and least understood roots of Israel’s diplomatic support throughout the world, which is its role as a niche arms supplier and influential tactical specialist in waging wars against peoples who dare offer resistance to state power as variously deployed against them. The Israeli experience in exerting oppressive control of the Palestinian people provides the foundation of Israel’s international credibility and perceptions of effectiveness in disseminating for economic and political profit its hardware and software associated with managing and suppressing the resistance of popular movements fighting for their rights. The Israel stress on pacification rather than victory exposes the true nature of what Halper identifies so vividly and comprehensively as the distinctive character of waging ‘war against the people.’ ]
Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Pluto Press, 2015, 296 pp., $25.00 US (pbk), ISBN 9780745334301.
Jeff Halper is an unusual hybrid presence on both the scholarly and political scene. He describes himself as an “activist-scholar” (6), which adopts a controversial self-identification. The conventional stance erects a high wall between scholarship and activism. To his credit and for our benefit, Halper excels almost equally in both roles. He is one of the most lucid speakers on the lecture circuit combining clarity with wisdom and a rich fund of information and firsthand experience, and his work as a writer is influential and widely known. His activist credentials have been built up over many years, especially in his work as co-founder and leader of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, which has bravely confronted Israeli demolition crews and IDF soldiers, helped Palestinians on multiple occasions to rebuild their destroyed homes, thereby responding humanely to one of Israel’s cruelest occupation practices, an instance of unlawful collective punishment. Halper has estimated that less than 2% of demolitions can lay claim to a credible security justification (the respected Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem, estimates 1.3% of demolitions are justified by security, while the rest are punitive or 621 of 47,000 since 1967). As an author his main prior book makes an unsurprisingly strong pitch for activism as the most reliable foundation for analysis and prescription. His important and incisive title gave the theme away—An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel.1 This earlier book remains valuable as testimony by a progressive Zionist in Israel that with good faith Jews and Palestinians might yet learn to live together, including finding a formula for sharing the land.
Halper’s own life experience makes this blend of scholarship and activism particularly compelling. He is an American born Jew who grew up in the Midwest and studied anthropology in Wisconsin, taught at a Quaker university for several years, and then moved to Israel where he married an Israeli and has three grown children. What particularly sets Halper apart from most other principled Jews in the ranks of critics of Israel is the striking combination of the radicalism of his opposition to the policies and practices of the Israeli state together with his evident commitment to remain in Israel no matter how far right the governing process drifts. Most other prominent Jewish critics of Israel have remained outside the country throughout their life (e.g. Noam Chomsky) or were born in Israel and then chose to become expatriate critical voices (e.g. Daniel Levy, Ilan Pappé, Gilad Azmun). There are a few internationally prominent Israeli journalists and cultural figures who have sustained sharply critical commentary (e.g. Gideon Levy, Amira Hass) and kept their Israeli residence despite harassment and threats.
In the book under review Halper broadens his own distinctive identity while enlarging the apertures of perception by which he views the Israeli state. He focuses attention on the Israeli arms industry, security doctrines, and policies, and examines Israel’s acquisition of formidable diplomatic influence grossly disproportionate to its size and capabilities. It is this gap between Israel’s significant impact on current world history and the modest scale of its territorial reality and its outsider status in most global settings that is the core mystery being explicated by Halper. He starts the book with some provocative questions that put the underlying puzzle before us in vivid language: “How does Israel get away with it? In a decidedly post-colonial age, how is Israel able to sustain a half-century occupation over the Palestinians, a people violently displaced in 1948, in the face of almost unanimous international opposition” (1)? He indicates that this phenomenon cannot be adequately “explained by normal international relations” nor by the strength of the Israel lobby in the United States nor by strong Israeli pushback to discredit critics by invoking the Holocaust as an indefinite source of impunity (3). What the book demonstrates very persuasively is that Israeli influence is a result of its extraordinary, partially hidden and understated role as arms supplier to more than 130 countries and as an increasingly significant mentor of national police forces and counter-terrorist operations and practices in many countries, including the United States.
Israel as Arms Merchant and Pacification Ideologue
Without exaggeration, War Against the People, is really three books in one. It is first of all a comprehensive and detailed look at the elaborate Israeli arms industry, including the extensive network of private companies engaged in arms production. Halper explores how Israel managed to become such a valued producer of sophisticated weaponry that so many governments have come to depend upon. Part of Israel’s success in the highly competitive international arms market is to identify and develop niches for itself in the wider global arms market that allows it to compete successfully for market share with companies backed by several of the world’s largest states by supplying specific kinds of weaponry that outperform the alternatives available for purchase. By so serving as an arms merchant to no less than 130 countries gives Israel a powerful unacknowledged source of leverage throughout the entire world. An aspect of Israel’s success is to be apolitical in its operations as an arms supplier, provided only that the foreign government poses no security threat to Israel.
Secondly, the book is a detailed examination of the specific ways that Israel has adapted its security doctrine and practice to the varieties of Palestinian resistance over the decades. The Israeli approach rests on adopting a goal toward internal security that seeks to achieve a tolerable level of “pacification” of the Palestinian population. As such it does not seek to “defeat” the Palestinians, including even Hamas, and is content with keeping violent resistance contained so that Israelis can go about their lives with reasonable security and the economy can prosper. At the same time, the threat of violent resistance never entirely disappears or is absent from the political consciousness and experience of Israeli society, and the fear factor keeps Israelis supportive of oppressive internal policies. Pacification in the face of a potentially very hostile minority Palestinian presence in pre-1967 Israel has presupposed a fusing of Israel’s military, paramilitary, police, and intelligence capabilities, but also a less understood Israeli politics of restraint. The capabilities to sustain pacifications must be continuously updated and adapted to evolving circumstances, including shifts in Palestinian tactics of resistance.
This mental shift from “victory” over the natives to their relentless “pacification” to some extent reflects the ethical orientation of a post-colonial world. In many respects Israel represents a species of settler colonialism, but it takes the form of seeking some kind of imposed accommodation with the native population rather than their extinction or spatial marginalization. Actually, as Israeli politics have moved further and further to the right, the tactics of pacification have become more coercive and brutal, and do seem to push the original dispossession of the nakba toward some kind of “final solution” by way of settlement expansion as likely supplemented at some point by population transfer and by periodic massive military operations of the sort that have occurred in Gaza in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014. In other words, pacification as conceived in the 1950s has become quite something more ominous for the Palestinians in the twenty-first century as “Palestine” shrinks in size and diminishes in threat while Israel’s territorial ambitions continue to expand and seem to be within reach.
The Israel/Palestine encounter is certainly unique in several of its aspects, yet it bears sufficient similarity to a range of threats facing many governments in the world to allow the Israeli government to serve as an exemplary practitioner of counterinsurgency war/politics. It is precisely the generality of contemporary security challenges situated within society that makes the Israeli experience seem so valuable to others, especially when reinforced by the widespread impression that Israel’s security policies have succeeded in the face of difficult challenges over an extended period. This combination of considerations gives Israel’s weapons, training programs, and security doctrines their global resonance. Especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the long-term character of the Israeli experience became a strong credential on the arms market and among strategy-minded think tanks. Israel’s perceived counterinsurgency record has even led other governments to mute or even abandon their criticisms of the manner in which Israel suppresses Palestinians and flaunts international law. In this way, the Israeli network of arms sales arrangements has not only functioned as direct sources of influence and economic benefit to Israel, but also contributed a political payoff by weakening motivations at the UN and elsewhere in the world to exert meaningful pressure on Israel to modify its policies and uphold its obligations under international law. What Halper helps us to understand is this rarely discussed relationship between the arms trade and what might be called an international diplomacy of pacification. In effect, Israel has quietly bought off most of its potentially most dangerous governmental adversaries by making itself an invaluable collaborator in the security domain, which is given priority by every government when it comes to shaping its foreign policy. The reach of this weapons diplomacy is further extended due to Israel’s willingness to do arms deals discreetly with the most repressive of regimes around the world even while at the same time it takes great pains to substantiate the claim that Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East.
Thirdly, this long experience of coping with Palestinian resistance has given Israel continuing field experience with tactics and weapons useful to subdue a non-state adversary, including convincing demonstrations of what works and what doesn’t. In fundamental respects the work of pacification is never finished, and so Israel continuously modifies its weapons mix to take account of battlefield lessons and technological innovations, and this is of great value to governments that were seeking to choose among several alternatives to meet the requirements of their particular security challenges. Israel can claim both the reliability of its weaponry through their field testing in response to varying conditions and success in adapting to ever changing tactics of Palestinian resistance. No other country has achieved this mastery over the hardware and software of a pacification approach to internal security.
Halper also makes us aware that pacification is what also best explains the hegemonic ambitions of America’s securitizing approach to world order. What Israel has achieved on a small scale, the United States is managing on a large scale. In other words the several hundred American foreign military bases together with navies patrolling all of the world’s oceans, further reinforced by satellite militarization of space for purposes of intelligence and possible attack are the coercive infrastructure of both neoliberal globalization and American global leadership. The objective is to keep those dissatisfied with this established order under sufficient control so that trade, investment, and basic security relations are not deeply disturbed. Part of Halper’s argument is that Israel understands the dynamics of an effective regime of global pacification better than any other country, and has done its best to be useful to the United States and Europe by providing niche support in terms of weaponry (say for border barriers, surveillance, and control) and doctrine (say targeted assassinations by drone strikes and collective blockades).
Matrix of Control
Halper relies upon an illuminating style of conceptualization to develop his basic analysis. For instance, one of his important contributions is to specify global pacification by reference to a “Matrix of Control.” The basic argument of the book is that the most defining “wars” of our times involve using state violence against a mobilized population that mounts threats against the established economic and political order. The matrix of control is the complex interaction of weapons, policies, practices, and ideas that make this project a reality. The paradigmatic case is the Israeli pacification of the Palestinians, which is less than their defeat or annihilation, but something other than sustained warfare; it is doing enough by way of forcible action to punish, terrorize, and suppress without clearly crossing the line drawn by legal prohibitions on mass atrocity and genocide. It is damping down the fires of Palestinian resistance into a smoldering mass of tensions and resentments that every so often bursts into flames, offering pretexts for launching a new campaign of devastation. The pattern of periodic onslaughts against Gaza since 2008 is indicative of the broader policies, with three massive attacks every 2-3 years, what Israeli officials are comfortable describing as “mowing the lawn” (146), which incidentally stimulates a new round of arms sales.
The Israeli matrix of control (143-190) is specified by reference to its various main components, forming an integrated and distinctive form of what Halper describes as “urban warfare” resting on the premise of “domestic securitization,” that is, conceiving of the enemy as mainly operating within the boundaries of the state, ultimately to be contained rather than defeated. Such an integrated approach relies on walls to keep the unwanted from entering, surveillance, fragmenting the population to be controlled, periodic and punitive violent suppression designed to prevent, preempt, and demoralize, and proactive intelligence that seeks to gain access to the inner circles of militant opposition forces. Such a matrix of control both deploys a mixture of traditional counterterrorist measures and the latest innovations in sophisticated technology, including armed robotics, drones, and a variety of overlapping surveillance techniques. The approach relies on a vertical layering of security measures that rests on redundancy to ensure effective control. What is original about this approach is its conscious realization that “victory” over hostile subjugated forces is not an acceptable or realizable policy option, and what works best is a system of permanent control sustained by a mix of coercive and psychological instruments.
Pacifying Palestinians and Pacifying the World
Halper shows how this matrix of control, which developed to enable Israeli settler society to achieve a tolerable level of security with respect to the indigenous Palestinian population, seeks to fulfill an elusive requirement. It maintains security without resorting to genocide or to the kind of destructive forms of mass slaughter that characterized earlier experiences of settler colonialism where the land occupied was cleared of natives. At the same time, it pacifies in a post-colonial era where the power of the colonial master has been effectively challenged throughout the world. It is no longer possible to beat the native population into a condition of passive resignation as had been the case so often during the heyday of the extensive European colonial empires. These two considerations suggest a policy puzzle for the pacifier who must avoid extreme violence and yet depends on a sufficient degree of violence to intimidate a restive population that believes resistance is justified and currently accords with the flow of history.
The Israeli answer in a variety of acknowledged and disguised forms is best understood by reference to the Dahiya Doctrine, which incorporates a logic of disproportionate retaliation (174-176). In effect, for every Israeli killed or home damaged or destroyed, a far greater number of Palestinians will be killed and entire residential neighborhoods destroyed. The Dahiya Docrtine was proclaimed originally to justify the destruction of the Dahiya neighborhood in south Beirut during the Lebanon War of 2006. The people living in densely populated Dahiya were viewed by Israel as supportive of Hezbollah, but it is descriptive of Israeli behavior generally with respect to Palestinian acts of resistance, particularly with respect to Gaza since falling under Hamas’s control. The supposedly centrist Tzipi Livni, the Israeli political leader who served as Foreign Minister during the massive attack on Gaza at the end of 2008, expressed this Israeli way of dealing with Palestinian resistance in Gaza in the following chilling words: “Hamas now understands that when you fire on its [Israel’s] citizens it responds by going wild—and this is a good thing” (quoted in Halper, 175). I would add that “going wild” is a euphemism for rejecting the efforts of international humanitarian law and the just war tradition to constrain the intensity of violence and suffering by insisting on proportional responses. In effect, to reject so overtly this admittedly vague effort of international law to impose limits on the conduct of warfare, Israel is incorporating into the core of its security approach a repudiation of the humanizing ambition of international law, and implicitly claiming the right on its own to use force as it wishes. This is a step back from the extensive attempt during the prior century to put the genie of war, if not back in its bottle, at least to gesture toward that end. With Israel’s concept of securitization, also descriptive of the approach taken by the United States, as well as such other countries as Russia, France, and China, it is arguable that international society has turned the normative clock back to a nihilistic zero.
There is another crucial feature of the matrix of control that is of wider relevance than Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that Halper associates with “Framing: A Tendentious Definition of ‘Terrorism’” (149-151). This framing idea is to make it appear that “the terrorists” are always those resisting control by the established political order, and never those that are exercising authority however oppressively. As Halper points out, the IDF may kill over 2,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are civilians, in the course of an armed confrontation in Gaza, as opposed to Hamas killing five Israeli civilians, but Hamas will still be depicted as the practitioner of terror and Israel’s violence will be put forward as defensive measures that are reasonable and necessary for the protection of the civilian population of Israel. The Israeli government will describe Palestinian civilian deaths as regrettable collateral damage, while attributing Hamas’s comparatively trivial lethality to a deliberate intention to kill Israeli civilians. The final step in the ideologizing process is to make this construction of the respective intentions of the two sides hinge on the question of deliberate intention, and since Hamas’s rockets are fired in the general direction of civilian populations the intention is declared to be deliberate, while Israel is seeking to destroy militarily relevant personnel and weaponry. This kind of manipulative framing by Israel has been borrowed by the United States and other governments to lend moral authority to the form of disproportionate violence that has characterized counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan in the post-9/11 era as well as lesser military operations around the world in the course of “the war on terror.”
What Israel has been doing within Palestinian territory it is seeking to control, the United States does globally. The introduction of drone warfare and special ops covert forces into dozens of countries throughout the world is an extension of the matrix of control as perfected by Israel within its limited field of operations. It also reformulates the parameters of permissible violence without regard to the limitations of international law, regarding any point of suspected adversaries throughout the planet as subject to deadly attack, borrowing notions of targeted assassination from the repertoire of Israeli practices. As with Israel, the operative goal of the so-called long war is not victory in the World War II sense, but rather the exercise of a sufficiency of control that is able to establish tolerable levels of security for Western societies and transnational economic activity. It is worth pointing out that as with Israel, the United States is unwilling to pay the costs in reputation and resources that would be required to achieve victory, although in the Iraq occupation as earlier in Vietnam it did seek to do more than pacify but in the end found the costs too high, and abandoned the undertaking.
Halper’s book gives essential insights to a key set of interrelated concerns: the political benefits to Israel arising from its dual role as quality arms supplier and counterinsurgency mentor; the degree to which Israel’s success in managing a hostile Palestinian population as well as a series of dangerous regional threats offers the United States a model for global securitization with a primary objective of preempting threats to the American homeland and safeguarding neoliberal global markets and trade routes from hostile forces; as also noted, the Israeli domestic security apparatus has been influential in the equipping and training of American and other national police forces. Additionally, Isreali technologies and knowhow have been relied upon to monitor borders and to erect barriers against unwanted entry; the advantages of having a seemingly permanent combat zone such as Gaza for field testing weapons and tactics increases the attractiveness of Israel as supplier of choice. This kind of combat zone is real world simulation that has many experimental advantages over the sorts of war games that are used to assess the effectiveness of weapons and tactics. Without incoming rockets from Gaza it would be impossible to reliably test the effectiveness of a defensive system such as the Iron Dome.
Concluding Comments
In the end, Halper answers the question as to why Israel’s seeming international unpopularity based of its long-term suppression of the Palestinian people does not harm its image or status. Israel manages to get away with its abusive human rights record while a more powerful and populous country such as apartheid South Africa was sanctioned and censured repeatedly. Of course, U.S. geopolitical muscle is part of the answer, but what Halper adds to our understanding in an insightful and factually supported manner is an appreciation of Israel’s extraordinary usefulness as arms supplier and counterinsurgency guru. A further implication of Israeli usefulness is a realization that governments give much more weight to relationships that bolster their security capabilities than they do to matters of international morality and law. Given these realities, it remains clear that the Palestinian national movement will have to wage its struggle on its own with principal support coming from civil society. Israel, it must be acknowledged has substantially neutralized both the UN and the foreign policy of most important countries, although public opinion around the world is moving in directions that could exert mounting pressure on Israel in the years to come.
As the title of Halper’s book suggests, what is transpiring worldwide, and is epitomized by the Israeli response to Palestinian opposition, can be best understood as part of a wider shift in the nature of global conflict in the post-Cold War period. Instead of most attention being given by security bureaucracies to rivalries and warfare among leading states, the most salient, dangerous, and cruelest conflicts are between state and society, or wars waged against people. There are no significant international wars between two or more states taking place now, while at least 30 internal wars are raging in different parts of the world. To be sure there have been a series of military interventions as part of the global pacification project under the direction of the United States and proxy wars in the Middle East in which major states intervene on opposite sides of a civil war. Yet whether we think of Syria as the paradigm of twenty-first century warfare or the Israeli matrix of control, it is “the people,” or a mobilized segment, that is being victimized. Halper’s book does the best job so far of depicting this new cartography of warfare, and deserves to be widely read and its main theses debated.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
I agree that Jeff Halper’s book merits as wide a reading public as possible. It explains so much more about the world situation than just Israel’s role in it. This is one real example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. You will, perhaps reluctantly, learn much from this book. I thank Prof. Falk for this review.
Mr. Falk,
You say
Most other prominent Jewish critics of Israel have remained outside the country throughout their life (e.g. Noam Chomsky)
I thought Chomsky spent time in Israel in a kibbutz.
Is this untrue?
Mr Falk,
You say
the several hundred American foreign military bases together with navies patrolling all of the world’s oceans,
I thought USA had about 800 foreign military bases.
I that “several hundred”?
Is this wrong? Was Chalmers Johnson exaggerating?
It all depends on what is counted as ‘a base,’ and I erred on the conservative side to
avoid any distractions arising from questions about the correct number.
I meant that Chomsky has lived the great majority of his adult years in the USA. I know
as a youth he spent summers or maybe longer at a kibbutz in Israel.
Dr. Falk – I have found Dr. Jeff Halper and Gilad Atzmon as the only two Israeli authors who represents the true spirit of Moses Law. I have honored both of them on my blog.
Jeff Halper PhD (born 1946), is the co-founder of Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, a US-born Israeli (dual) citizen. He is author, political activist and have taught Anthropology at University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University. Jeff has fought for the rights of Arab and Ethiopian Jews in Israel who are treated as low-caste Jews, just like the Dalits in India.
Jeff Halper was interviewed by the ‘Talking Stick TV’ in March 2010 (watch the video below). He said: “The Israeli public can live with the Occupation, it has lived with for 43 years now, and it is only with international pressure on Israel that we are in the end gonna to bring a meaningful peace. So we are trying to work in Europe, we work in other parts of the world. I was just in China recently – and of course in the united States because Israel sees the United States as the ‘only player’ in town. So that is very important. But the United Satates government, whether it’s Obama or Bush or Clinton or anybody els, isn’t going to be assertive on Israel …….. The conflict is not localized but it impacts the American interests, Western interests and the whole global system. What is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran, what is happening with Al-Qaeda, the whole alienation of the West from the Muslim world in general – all that comes out of the Israel-Palestine conflict. That’s the symbolic epicenter….”
https://rehmat1.com/2010/05/22/jeff-halper-the-israeli-jew-who-hates-occupation/
Richard, I never heard of Jeff Halper before reading this, but this book expands on the writing of Jonathan Cook and re-posted to my Blog August 18, 2013. I will edit that article to include this link as supplemental information.
https://ray032.com/2013/08/18/israels-booming-secretive-arms-trade-merchants-of-death/
Correction: Jonathan Cook refers to this book Jeff Halper was writing 32 months ago. Reading your article gave me the occasion to re-read my article and I forgot Jonathan Cook was most probably basing his article on research by Mr. Halper.
Dr. Falk – According to C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases – the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.
Dr. Noam Chomsky lived for several years on the land stolen from native Palestinians as a young committed Zionist Jew. That experience has lived inside him to this day. He claims that Israel has the right to exist as a ‘Jewish state’. He only dislike Israel for occupation of Gaza and the west Bank. He is against the BDS movement, which is a great fraud in my opinion that’s shared by Israeli-born author Gilad Atzmon.
In an article published at AlterNet on September 3, 2012, entitled ‘Why America and Israel Are the Greatest Threats to Peace‘. Dr. chomsky’s article begins with the statement: “Imagine if Iran – or any other country – did a fraction of what Americans and Israel do at will“. However, after criticizing both the US and Israel for their warmongering policies toward the Islamic Republic – Chomsky drops the Zionist entity from his list of “brutal and repressive regimes” in the region.
“The Iranian government is brutal and repressive, as are Washington’s allies in the region,” wrote Chomsky. One wonder why none of the leaders from 120 NAM member countries and 23 non-NAM countries who attended the 16th NAM summit in Tehran last week – compared Iran with the United States in those categories!
https://rehmat1.com/2012/09/06/chomsky-i-support-israel-but/
Dear Professor Falk,
The US policy of global ‘pacification’ would be quite defensible if its “primary objective of pre-empting threats to the American homeland” were as simple as that. Unfortunately, such a policy creates more threats than it prevents. Every drone strike that kills mothers and children will produce more jihadists. As the “Homeland” argument becomes more nonsensical, we hear the propaganda shift to “protecting American interests”, as in o-i-l.
On Tuesday, former Israeli ambassador in Washington and currently a member of Israeli Knesset, Michael Oren accused Democrat Jewish presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of Blood Libel for saying that he didn’t support the idea of bringing Israeli leaders to face the ICC court because they had killed 10,000 Palestinians during the 2014 invasion of Gaza Strip.
“Anybody help me out here, because I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?” he said.
One of his interviewers checked while they talked and said the number was closer to 2,300 killed altogether and 10,000 wounded.
According to UNHRC during the 50-day attack, Israelis killed 2,251 Palestinians – mostly civilians including 531 children while wounding another 10,000. On Israeli side 71 soldiers and two civilian were killed….
https://rehmat1.com/2016/04/08/ex-israeli-envoy-accuses-bernie-sanders-of-blood-libel/
If folks do not understand that, Jews and Arabs are given over to the devil, and nations are spiritually excommunicated – have nothing to eat (in spiritual and natural), you may recall good faith of those who were killed and persecuted by Queen Jezebel
Besides, you should note that EU will want to be like New Colonies and restrict immigration of war migrants by the imposition of visa, as this will be their only way to do that what is acceptable to themselves. Besides, Arab war migrant will want to immigrate to Western Europe to break the satanic grip of Arab Nazi-camps. But I just do not understand why EU is not welcoming the Arabs in large numbers – while is prosecuting Jews for Faith rights in Holy Land. I have no other legitimate explanation, except, that they are spiritually excommunicated from the Lord’s Table. This, in fact, can be visibly manifested in their Church-Mission/s of the World.
All in all, satanic seals and Blaspheming of God’s Spirit are harsh sins upon the human race, and in addition to that, all tempering with Apostolic Church Order has brought deserving fate upon evil humans in corporate.
I do not see this as punishment, but the fact is that it happens so that evil human sin remains in blood lines and Grace can’t reach it nor it will. There is thing that Grace of God does not reach, and absolutely will not.
There will be no sustained Peace in Arab Lands and Hebrew Land until they recognize what their evil ancestors have done.
I personally, no longer do have any compassion for the human race, including Jews and Arabs; it is totally annulled by Spirit of God.
I know in fact that works of destruction and death will deserve nothing but just that.
Now, do remember that this is that without doubt Church Roman Catholic Charismatic has felt and said.
They can keep on with all evil they wish, and I can even hope that wicked do so upon all their children.
Moshe – as usual your rant has nothing to do with my comment.
I got to salute Canadian, professor Julie Macfarlane (University of Windsor, Ontario), for explaining Christianity to the DUMMYS. She claims that at age 18, she provided oral sex to her priest who told her that’s commanded by the Bible.
https://rehmat1.com/2015/12/18/god-wanted-me-to-perform-oral-sex-on-my-priest/
Canadian Prist? The priest from a neighboring village told my brother (who had to get some Church paperwork from our moved parish) that U.S. Catholics are “an other religion” – “not Chatolics” … he was gravely confused in his facts. He must have meant “other religion” is among US Catholisc – folks they never Baptised into Apostolic Faith: “other religion”. It was terrible and grave sin in his mixing up on his facts. In fact, that specific prist had personal female tendencies – in his generational genetics. But no, he did not abuse the boys, in fact, he has not. He was decently BAPTISED priest. In fact, it’s difficult to FIND Baptised into Apostolic Faith.
Of course, Sanders simply mixed up the number of killed with the number of wounded. (And he obviously hadn’t made a definitive statement anyway.) The Sanders campaign acknowledged this fairly quickly — at least four days before your post that doesn’t refer to the correction: https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-statement-israel-gaza-conflict/
Also of course, the hasbara gang including Oren jumped on Sanders incessantly, implying that 2,300 was an acceptable number to kill. Which is worse: a “Blood Libel” of misremembering how many Palestinians Israel killed — or taking the actual blood of 2,300+ people?
Dear Eric
2,300+ Palestinians were killed, about half of them Hamas terrorists according to IDF estimates, because Hamas was firing its rockets from residential neighborhoods, in and around schools, playgrounds, hospitals, clinics, mosques and residential buildings, and in many cases not allowing residents to leave after Israeli warnings that attacks on Hamas launching sites were imminent
Jeff Halper’s book could almost be a marketing tool for Israeli counter-terrorism technologies, products and services. However, it is doubtful that he would honestly detail the incidents which induced Israel to develop these technologies and thus gain international diplomatic support as a niche supplier and tactical supporter of established nation-states against non-state actors in asymmetrical warfare. Experience in combatting Palestinian terrorists and mastery of counter-terrorism skill-sets and technologies are very much in demand elsewhere, including Europe, Africa, the United States and Asia, specifically in Russia and China, which have experienced Jihadi based terrorism in Chechnya and Xinjiang. Israel’s diplomatic influence may be out of proportion to the nation’s size and population, but not with respect to her technical prowess in skill sets and technologies in counter-terrorist training and assistance to increasing numbers of allies, which may even include members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which likely deal with Israel “under the table.”
The “Matrix of Control” is a primary defense against non-state actors, (i.e. al-Qaida, Islamic State/Daesh, al-Shabab, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, et-al) and a laboratory to develop a mix of weapons, practices and policies to contain them within the bounds of international law. These techniques include traditional counter-terrorism measures and innovations in technology, including drones, robots and surveillance.A new statute against the international crime of “aggression” will take effect in 2017. The “Dahlia Doctrine” is Israel’s counterpart to the “Powell Doctrine,” applied in “Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), in which overwhelming force was applied to roll back Saddam Hussein’s aggression in Kuwait. Proportionality is that amount of force necessary to achieve a military objective, be it removing Saddam from Kuwait, or suppressing Hamas rocket fire. Once the objective is attained, the application of force must end.
While adaptation to changing threats may not be particularly unique, those who adapt to challenges survive; those who fail to do so perish. Some to the far right of the current Israeli government, fault Prime Minister Netanyahu as overly “risk averse,” and would respond to acts of terrorism far more boldly and aggressively. While “Pacification,” of Palestinians may be the more ethical alternative to the “Final Solution” as called for by Hamas’ in Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant, Israel’s forbearance and tolerance are not unlimited and there is no prediction to how any Israeli government would react to an instance of mass casualty terrorism. ” . . . defenders have no alternative but to match destruction with destruction, slaughter with greater slaughter.: –Prime Minister Netanyahu As every terrorist’s objective is to reach “Paradise” and collect his 72 Virgins, the I.D.F.’s mission should include assisting them in every way possible to reach that objective!
“Mater Artium Necessitas (Necessity is the Mother of Invention)” and while Israel is certainly not unique as a terrorist target, she has much longer experience than other nations, dating from the “Fedayeen” of 1948, to Hamas in “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. The refusal of the divided Palestinian entities to negotiate a “two-state (or given their divisions),” a “three-state” solution, paints them into a corner from which it is increasingly difficult, if not totally impossible, to extricate themselves. Perhaps, recognizing the futility of inducing children with knives to kill Israelis via social media, many of whom are killed in the process, Mahmoud Abbas has offered to engage in negotiations with his Israeli counter-part, earning condemnation as a traitor by Hamas.
Invoking the Holocaust is done to preclude its repetition as called for by Hamas in Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant calling for the genocide of all Jews, not limited to those in Israel. Article 13 of the Hamas Covenant explicitly rejects all forms of non-violent conflict resolution (e.g. negotiation, mediation) in favor of perpetual war against Israel, thus generating the biennial practice of “Mowing the Lawn,” in response to Hamas rocket attacks on civilian communities, among other provocations. The text of the Hamas Covenant can be read in its entirety at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
As Hamas targets Israeli civilian communes in violation of the “discrimination” principle of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (binding only on state parties ratifying them), Israeli targeting of “human shields” conscripted to protect Hamas rocket launchers and arms caches, is legitimate. As the aggressors, Hamas may define its own “Rules Of Engagement,” but when those same “R.O.E.” are applied against them, they have no right to complain. There is an old Marine Corps adage about “Payback” which cannot be repeated in its entirety in polite circles, but in essence, “what goes around, comes around!” What’s sauce for the Israeli goose, is also sauce for the Palestinian gander!
The “Nakba” is the consequence of the 1948-49 Arab League war for the eradication of Israel. While Israel accepted UNGAR 181, providing for two states, “one Arab and one Jewish” in the express language of the Resolution, Palestinians continue to reject the two-state concept, driven by an arrogant, greedy, self-centered sense of entitlement to “all the land between the river (Jordan) and the sea (Mediterranean). If all of the land, including Israel within the 1949 “Green Line (not recognized as an international border)” is in dispute, in the absence of a negotiated agreement, under a Palestinian “one to the exclusion of the other” proposition, it belongs to whomever can hold it. Israel also has a valid claim on all of the land, except that given to Jordan under a separate treaty. See: http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/guest-blog/a-pre-occupation-with-an-occupation-that-doesnt-exist/2016/04/12/ If the Palestinians are not bound by UNGAR 181, Israel need not be bound by it either and reclaim what land she conceded for statehood in 1948! Under International Law, Israel as the victorious belligerent of the 1967 “Six Day War,” may retain captured land until possession os modified by treaty. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uti_possidetis
Like other “Fifth Columnists” and Quislings, Halper, Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, et-al, do not represent the mainstream of the Israeli society they seek to overthrow. They are a remnant of the tired, long outdated Marxist ethic, which no longer exists outside of Cuba and North Korea. Of course, Halper ignores the reality that Jews were the original indigenous population of present day Israel. They are no doubt under the close surveillance of the Shin-Bet for opposition to the recently revived practice of “home demolitions,” for terrorist killers, who by their own actions render their families homeless, perhaps a cruel, but effective sanction. Palestinian terrorism does nothing to alleviate their abysmal living conditions. Diversion of the resources now devoted to perpetual war against Israel, if applied to Housing, education and development, would improve their quality of life, as would peaceful coexistence with their Israeli neighbors. As Thucydides, Historian of the Peloponnesian War, phrased it it the Melian Debate: “The strong do what they will; the
weak suffer what they must.” To date, the Palestinians have chosen to suffer, rather than
choose to live in peace and prosperity.
Jeff Halper interviewed on his book.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44335.htm
Thanks, Ray, for calling attention to this interview, which makes some disturbing observations, especially
toward the end.
“That’s right. And to her credit, the only one that really is using the word capitalism, that word up front in her analysis, is Naomi Klein. With The Shock Doctrine and now her new book on climate change and capitalism [This Changes Everything]. But it’s like that joke: One fish asks another fish, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What water?” You know, you are living in this system. And it is so encompassing, and it affects everything that we do. Who our enemies are. How we dress. What our values are. How we talk. What language … everything. What we eat. And it’s an unsustainable system. But it’s a system that we’ve kind of internalized. We don’t even think about it anymore.
And so that’s, I think, the value of critical analysis, and bringing back that language, including language like pacification, is that really shows us that we’re in fact living in a very political water. And not just some normal, everyday reality that is inevitable.”
Coincidentally, I posted my latest article to my Blog on the 13th titled ‘REGIME CHANGE’
It’s focused around a 2 hour dissertation by Ken O’Keefe whom you may have heard of, essentially expressing the same ideas Jeff Halper is saying, but using other words to say it.
In your comment, Richard, you wrote this: which makes some disturbing observations, especially toward the end.
Are you referring to Halper’s view Israel is becoming more Fascist? More outsiders are beginning to realize that about Israel. This Blog bears record I have been saying that for a long TIME.
REGIME CHANGE
April 13, 2016
https://ray032.com/2016/04/13/regime-change/
The site complained that I sent a duplicate comment. I did sent it twice because it disappeared without a trace after I sent it using Safari, so I tried Firefox.
Reblogged this on QCpal.
The myth of Palestinian Arab refugees exposed
by Yoram Ettinger
Video: The myth of Palestinian Arab refugees exposed
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
YouTube/Facebook 6-minute-video seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast
#11: http://bit.ly/1XECxmn; the entire mini-seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS
The circumstances and numbers of the 1948/49 Palestinian refugees have been dramatically distorted, in order to de-legitimize Israel.
In March, 1976, Mahmoud Abbas told the PLO newspaper, Filastin A-Thawra: “Arab armies forced Palestinians to leave their homes.” On October 2, 1948, The London Economist wrote: “the most potent factor [triggering the Arab flight] were the announcements by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to evacuate… and that Arabs accepting Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades….”
On June 8, 1951, the Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha told the Lebanese daily, Al Hoda: “In 1948, the Arab leadership advised Arabs in Palestine to leave their homes temporarily.” Syria’s Prime Minister, Khaled al-Azam, admitted, in his 1973 memoirs: “We brought destruction upon the refugees, by calling on them to leave their homes.”
On April 28, 1948, Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner in Palestine stated: A total evacuation was urged by higher Arab quarters. John Troutbeck, Head of the British Middle East Office, in Cairo (June 1949): “The refugees know who their enemies are – their Arab brothers who persuaded them to leave their homes…”
Ismayil Safwat, Commander-in–Chief of the Arab Liberation Army (March 23, 1948): “The Jews have not attacked any Arab village, unless attacked first.”
The Palestinian leadership – e.g., Haj Amin Al-Husseini and Hassan Bey Salameh – collaborated with Hitler, seeking Nazi support to settle “the Jewish problem” in Palestine in accordance with the practice employed in Europe. On January 9, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas stated: “We pledge to continue on the path of the martyrs…. We must remember the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin Al-Husseini….”
The Commander-in-Chief of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi el-Kaukji, a notorious Nazi collaborator, threatened in August, 1947 threatened: “Should the UN vote the wrong way, we will initiate a total war… murder, wreck and ruin everything….” On Nov. 24, 1947, the Acting Chairman of the (Palestinian) Arab Higher Committee, Jamal Al-Husseini, threatened: “Palestine shall be consumed with fire and blood if the Jews get any part of it.”
Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary General of the Arab League told the Egyptian daily Akhbar al Yom on October 11, 1947: “…This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacres, or the Crusaders’ wars…. Each fighter deems death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise….The war will be an opportunity for vast plunder… ”
During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the Arabs in Palestine terrorized their Jewish neighbors in order to abort the establishment of the Jewish State. They defied the November 29, 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181; Article 80 of the 1945 U.N. Charter (that includes the “Mandate of Palestine,” which stipulates a Jewish state in the entire area west of the Jordan River); the July 24, 1922 League of Nations’ “Mandate for Palestine,”; the April 1920 San Remo Conference of the First World War Allied Powers, which resolved to establish a Jewish national home on both sides of the Jordan River; and the November, 1917 Balfour Declaration, which was the basis for San Remo.
In 135 CE, the Roman Empire renamed/misrepresented Judea as Palestina – a derivative of Phillistia/Philistines, who were not Arabs, but an Aegean (Greek) Sea tribe – in an attempt to eradicate Judaism from human memory. In 2016, the issue of the Palestinian Arab refugees, is dramatically misrepresented, as a tool to eradicate the Jewish State.
The Palestinian claims of dispossession fail every reality test. The next 6-minute video of the mini-seminar will expose the startling misrepresentation of the number of the 1948/9 Palestinian refugees.
YouTube/Facebook video-seminar on US-Israel and the Mideast:
#1 The two-way-street, mutually-beneficial US-Israel: http://bit.ly/16FP01N
#2 The Jewish-Arab demographic balance: http://bit.ly/1I60R9h
#3 The US-Israel strategic partnership: http://bit.ly/1RniWWB
#4 The 400-year-old foundations of the US-Israel covenant: http://bit.ly/1TRiJes
#5 Is the Palestinian issue a crown-jewel of the Arabs? http://bit.ly/1T8Ob83
#6 Is the Palest’n issue the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict? http://bit.ly/1LW4hKD
#7 The precariousness of Israel’s narrow waistline: http://bit.ly/1YDNIdJ
#8 America, be wary of a Palestinian state: http://bit.ly/1nRDOYD
#9 Palestinian terrorism – Lone Wolves or institutional? http://bit.ly/1ZgzjnX
#10 Has the Palestinian issue triggered anti-US terrorism? http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S
#11 The myth of Palestinian Arab refugees exposed: http://bit.ly/1XECxmn